The neuroscience of emotions

"Feelings don't just matter - they are what mattering means." - Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

The role of emotions in buying is crucial, but often overlooked.

You may be under the impression that you make predominantly rational decisions about what you're going to buy. Certainly, many Sales Pages seem to be written on that assumption. A product or service's features are laid out clearly, sometimes the benefits of those features are also laid out, an argument is made as to why the price offers such good value.

Unfortunately, in a case such as this, however well-written the page is, and however good the product/service is, and no matter what great value the price represents - if you haven't first made a connection to your reader's emotions, the rest of the page is largely irrelevant.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discovered (from working with patients with very specific brain damage, just to the area of the brain where we process emotions) that when we can't experience emotions, we're literally unable to come to a decision, even about trivial matters such as what sandwich to have for lunch or what time a routine appointment should be scheduled. It turns out that making decisions is an emotions-first process, which we then go on to post-rationalise.

This is not to say that this post-rationalisation isn't important. I have a 10-point checklist that I use when evaluating clients' Sales Pages, and while creating an emotional connection comes right up near the top of the list, there's also a point which is about evaluating the bottom line (do the claims add up? is the offering decent value for the price?). So it's not that it isn't important for page to make the rational case for why someone should buy your offering, it's just that if you don't make an emotional connection with your reader first, it doesn't matter how strong your logical arguments are.

Google carried out research with 3,000 B2B buyers and found that this emotional connection was, counter-intuitively, even more important to B2B brands than B2C:

On average, B2B customers are significantly more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers.

While it may seem surprising at first, this high level of connection with B2B customers makes a lot of sense. When a personal consumer makes a bad purchase, the stakes are relatively low. Best case, it’s returnable. If not, it might require an explanation to a spouse. Business purchases, on the other hand, can involve huge amounts of risk: Responsibility for a multi-million dollar software acquisition that goes bad can lead to poor business performance and even the loss of a job. The business customer won’t buy unless there is a substantial emotional connection to help overcome this risk.

The need to create emotional connection from scratch is less important if most of your clients come via word of mouth referrals, or are coming to your Sales Page after experiencing your work via a live workshop - in that case, they'll already have a sense of connection with you and your work.

But for the people who reach your Sales Page 'cold', without much prior experience of you and what you do - they're extremely unlikely to make the decision to buy, even if you're offering the exact thing that they need. If our emotions aren't engaged, we simply don't have a way of gauging what matters and what doesn't.

So, how do you bring emotional connection into the way you write your web copy?

Well, it starts with empathy - which means you need to really know (and talk to - and more importantly, listen to) your customers. You need to write in their language, using the exact words that they use.

But using your clients' own words is only one way to bring in that emotional connection. 

Stories are engines for creating emotional responses in others. They have a visceral effect on us - they're not real, but they feel real.

When people have an MRI scan while they read a short story, the areas of the brain that light up when they read about an activity are identical to those that light up when they actually experience it. That's the power you can tap into by using stories in your Sales Page. 

The stories can be case studies or testimonials, or stories of your own experiences that relate to your offering.

And the big plus point to connecting with your potential customer's emotions is that if you hit the jackpot - if you describe their experience so exactly that it makes them wonder how you got inside their head - then the natural by-product of that is the creation of some degree of emotional urgency. You don't need to create false scarcity ('only 2 places left! Buy now before this product is withdrawn forever!') because your reader now genuinely wants what you're selling. There's no need to push them towards the sale - they'll be looking for the 'buy now' button entirely of their own accord.

If you’d like help creating emotional urgency in your copy, and other ethical copywriting techniques, you might like to find out more about how we could work together - let’s hop on a call to talk it through.